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Learn to use the Source Editor
The source editor is by far the best way to edit any pages and you will need it whenever you have to work with or on Templates. You got much more ways open for formatting text, creating layouts and you may even add html code if you desire. This page leads you into the Wikis syntax and offers examples on how to use it. Entering the Source Editor To enter the source editor, open the page you want to edit and click on the 'edit' button. Then choose the classic editor. Once the Classic Editor has loaded you may or may not be in the Source Editor already. That depends on how complicated the site is: if any templates are used within the site, the Source Editor loads automatically because the Classic Editor is not able to interpret it. Select the 'Source' tab to switch. Don't be afraid of any 'code' you see there. It's easy understandable once you have read this tutorial. To try out the things you want to learn here, the Sandbox is useful. It is a special, safe page for any tryouts. Use it to play around without fear of damaging stuff. Preview of your doings On the Source Editor, click the 'Desktop' button to the right of the sreen. This opens up a preview window which will display the fully formatted page to you (also rendered templates and images and so on). Texting and Formatting Basic texting is straight forward, like you did with the Visual Editor. You write down your infos and start formatting it. Paragraphs are inserted automatically when you switch to a new line. Bold, Italic, Underlined and Indents :Here are some examples to simply format texts. The lines in ' format are html comments to explain the 'code' for you. These will not be visible on a preview. Feel free to copy and paste the below stuff into the Sandbox and play around a bit. This is normal text, until I make it bold! This is normal text, until I make it italic! This is a '''''bold and italic text. For underlined text you got to add some html tag. This is a normal line. :This line is indented. ::This line is even more far away. :::This line is even much more far away. List up things :You can enlist things using bullet lists or numbered lists. :Note that combining both list types sometimes does not work out too well on the Wiki. Using numbered lists is a little messy whenever you want to place some additional text inbetween numbered lines. The numbers may not proceed correctly then. You will want to stick to bullet lists as an alternative. *First Entry of the list *Second Entry of the List *Third Entry of ... and so on .... *I am a Golem **I am a Stone Golem ***I am a Slate Golem ***I am a Sandstone Golem **I am a Metal Golem ***I am an Iron Golem *I am a Spider **I am a Redbacked Spider **I am a Shadow Spider #I am a Golem ##I am a Stone Golem ###I am a Slate Golem ###I am a Sandstone Golem Links to other shiny sites :Linking is the pest practice for having a cool Wiki structure. As an example, whenever you create a page for a creature, you will want to describe where it can be found at. You name the location, that could be a city or an area and set it up as a link. Most of these sites are already available, others are not. :Whenever you open the link creation with two brackets and enter some characters, Source Editor will search for existing pages and mention them to you. Most of the time you will be able to find an existing page and can auto-complete the link. Don't worry if you don't find a page. The link you create still works and is shown as a 'red link'. Red links signal you that the page does not yet exist. If you click on that link, the page creation dialog shows up, where you can start a new page for it. However, don't fear to get burned out by doing too much stuff. Stay at your current site first and finish it up. Other sites can wait for a bit. They don't have to be done by you either, if you don't want to. The Gifted's Guide to the Istaria Wiki Best guide ever! http://istariareference.com http://istariareference.com Istaria Reference Webpage Category:Creature Alternative Text Messing around with images Add a photo :You can use the photo assistant to the right of Source Editor to upload a photo. The assistant will lead you through some informational steps, please use them. :*First, open up the 'more options' section and enter a self explaining name for the image. For example: 'wonderful moon above the shore of kion.jpg'. Yes the file name is long, but Admins and other committers will be thankful for it. :*On the layout secion you may want to leave the option 'Thumbnail' activated. The image is resized automatically to a Wiki-wide unified width then. It is shown in full resolution by viewers when they click on the thumbnail. :*Alignment tells the assistant how to handle the text flow around the picture. Our Wiki's default is 'right' which means the text flows around the image to the left. :*You may also choose to add a caption for your image. Example fitting to the above file name: 'Isn't it wonderful?' :*You may ignore the licensing stuff as long as you're the creator of the photo. :Once you created the photo code line, do a preview of your page and open the photo's detailed view. Click the 'more info' button, the picture's page shows up. At the lower part of the page you can see a 'Add Category' button. Use it and enter an image category for the picture. This part is made based on common sense. If your page is of category 'Creature', the pictures should be of category 'Creature Image'. The Editor will help you with it's autocomplete capabilities. Once you selected the correct category, don't forget to press the 'Save' button. Manipulate a photo :Once the photo code has been created you're still able to change some things. Create a gallery :You may also create a gallery for your page. :Follow the below code: File:Add photo button.jpg|Button to add a photo File:Desktop_preview.jpg|Desktop preview button File:Choosing_the_classic_editor.jpg|Choose the classic editor :The first two entries just show some pictures while the last one also links to a site. You are able to format the caption text aswell as create links. Incase you did not yet upload the pictures for your gallery, the gallery shows a placeholder for each of the missing files. You can click on them to open the photo assistant and insert the photo accordingly. Using templates Templates are predefined code parts you can use to automatically generate content on your page. There are two main purposes on them: *Unified layout and content for reocurring pages (ex. each creature page needs the same set of information:level, health, class, location, quests, loot, ..) *To ease your life in the wiki! You do not need to know the code to use it. You just use it and alot of work is done by not wasting your time (talking about inventing the wheel again). Add a single informative template to a page :The easiest method to learn about templates is to use predefined template pages. Luckily this Wiki is very old already and has alot of them. You can seek available templates in the Category:Templates. Most of the time, a template page provides you a box of code you can copy and paste to where you need it. Let's try this by copying the code of the Template:Item Summary into the Sandbox. Select the whole text in the box and copy it into clipboard. Open the Sandbox, start to edit it using the Source Editor and paste the code there. Now do a preview of the page. :As you can see the template renders something (probably what it's made for), but there is no information in it yet. To add information on the template, close the preview and read the code. You will find lines ending with an equal sign. Infront of the sign you read some 'name' which may be almost the same than one of the entires shown before on preview. The only thing what you need to do now is: Write down something behind the equal sign. Go do some trial and error and review your doings, so you get a feeling for the template. :Let's try out another template, the Template:Quest. It offers you a little more to fill out and does some shiny things behind. Add some city to the 'port=' line and don't forget to remove the comment there. Once you preview the page you will examine that the template automatically linked your text. If it was a valid city (or rather an existing page for the city) you are able to open it's page by a mouse click. Play around a little bit to get a feeling for that. Also add some invalid data to check what happens with the link, then. Add a template needing external data :On the above templates you provided a single value for each data. On some of the templates it may be necessary to add more than one value. You will need to set those by your own. Please copy and paste the Template:LootTable to your Sandbox. If you review the empty template, the table is collapsed and when opened, empty. Let's fill some loot into it: :Note: If you preview the page now you may encounter a weird behavior. Your entered loot item is not shown! This is due to some problem in the Wikia Editors, they are not yet able to read out manually set properties. Let's hope the developers will fix that soon. You are still able to review such templates by publishing the site. Enter an 'edit summary' to your right (write 'testing' for this example), select the 'Minor edit' option and press 'Publish'. The Sandbox page will now be stored to the wiki and you are redirected to it. Looking at the loot table will show your loot entry finally. Add a new page using templates :The Istaria Wiki comes with alot of predefined page templates you can use to create a new page. Using these lets you save alot of time on creating pages, since you do not need to care about any single reference to other needed information. The templates take over crosslinking for you, extract additional information from other pages and link/show it and they set up necessary categories accordingly. Please find them under Category:New Page Templates. Read into one of them for a little and choose a smaller one for the Sandbox. Do some trial and error with it there to get a feeling on how to use it. Since some of the functionality may not work correctly in the Sandbox, feel free to open an already existing page in Source Editor to do more review. Don't worry about damaging anything there. As long as you don't press the 'Publish' button, nothing is changed. Even if you did that by mistake there is a way to roll back the page. List of useful templates <--! Print out the page's name. This is useful to keep a site dynamic and has it's benefit, whenever the page gets renamed (may happen when a creature's ingame name changes, for example) --> is a Golem. s are found west of Kion. This text flows right of the photo. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit, sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. This text does not anymore flow around the image. Category:Istaria Wiki howto